The Summer before the Dark Summary

Although one can trace how Kate Brown represents another of Lessing's female characters who break out of traditional roles and values, Kate is the first one that depicts a different stage of life, that of the aging woman who recognizes both her psychological and physiological life changes and eventually embraces them. Lessing portrays women in such instances who do not necessarily experience a radical breakdown but whose biological tendencies allow them to be receptive to a change in life, albeit not initially. When the reader first encounters the middle-aged Kate, she is unaware and resistant to changes in her accustomed role as mother and wife, even though her children are grown and repeatedly leave the home environment she has provided. Shaped by the typical biological and societal roles of mother and wife, Kate's personality has developed accordingly.

The Summer before the Dark Short Guide

Doris Lessing Biographies (5)

Doris Lessing (born 1919) was a South African expatriate writer known for her strong sense of feminism. A short story writer and novelist, as well as essayist and critic, Lessing was deeply concerned ...
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Doris Lessing, whose long career as a novelist, short story writer, and essayist began in the mid-twentieth century, is considered among the most important writers of the modern postwar era. Since her...
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Biography EssayDoris Lessing burst upon the British literary scene in 1950 with her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, and she has remained at the top ever since. In the past four decades, her work ...
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[This entry was updated by Paul Schlueter from his entry in the Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography, volume 8, pp. 228-254.]Doris Lessing burst upon the British literary scene in 1950 wit...
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Doris Lessing's literary career spans more than four decades; consequently her texts, both fiction and nonfiction, are valuable at the most basic level as historical records that tackle the central po...
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